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Pressure that hurts students

Someone in the corrupt world of Philadelphia politics know who was behind the pressure for the resignation of the first Latina member of the School Reform…

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Someone in the corrupt world of Philadelphia politics know who was behind the pressure for the resignation of the first Latina member of the School Reform Commission.

 

It’s one more name among the typical list of career politicians that pull the strings behind the scenes, or of political favors to be paid in Harrisburg.

Nevertheless, everyone is aware of the another pressure that led Heidi Ramírez to resign: The system is failing Philadelphia’s students.

The young people who don’t drop out, the ones that do go to class and do graduate, are coming out ill-prepared. That’s a fact. A fact that can be confirmed by the local universities that don’t accept them because some haven’t even learned how to read.

Ramírez isn’t the Latina that’s leaving the SRC. She’s the best qualified professional for a comission that was created to rescue the School District from a crisis of both finances and achievement.

She’s the expert in educational policy, with experience on the federal, regional and local level, who surely found herself inmersed in a world of politics in which good officials like herself only become frustrated witnesses to a lack of commitment to students and accountability to the public.

There’s something fishy about the School District’s “political” maneuvers, something which must have frustrated many other committed employees like Ramírez.

Now Johnny Irrizarry is the only Latino on the comission, a man with convictions and a long trajectory of helping Philadelphia’s students. But there’s a problem; he doesn’t know politics, and he doesn’t want to.

The School District Superintendent Arlene Ackerman spoke with AL DÍA’s editorial department las August 14th, saying that “we still have a long way to go”, and that “racial disparities are unacceptable”.... More than that, the interview made apparent the political pressures that surround the School District.

Ackerman also conceded that she “couldn’t defend” EMO schools; but it’s an educational model that the District has given one to two more years of life despite the fact that it doesn’t work. “It was the decision of politicians”, said the Superintendent; and students are the ones that lose out.

“I don’t worry about the things that I can’t change”, she said in regards to School District bureaucracy. She added that education in Philadelphia is a business that moves $3 billion each year.

We already know, then, where the other pressures come from.

 

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